Above: last night I watched Grow Your Own Drugs on BBC2. Presented by James Wong (an ethnobotanist, whatever they are) it looked at various herbal remedies for minor ailments. We saw James Wong walking barefoot through sunlit flower-strewn meadows, sensitively interviewing people with unsightly eczema, and mixing up herbal concoctions in an infectious Blue Peter style.
Above: my current library book is Nature's Alchemist by Anna Parkinson. It is a book about a book - John Parkinson's superlative 1629 Paradisi in Sole: Paradisus Terrestris. It describes the enthusiasm with which the seventeenth-century botanists recorded and classified the natural world (and also tells you a lot about religion, politics and life in Stuart London).
Above: Helen B's mother is a medical herbalist and often at her house you come across afternoon groups of earnest-minded blue-stocking medical herbalists debating symptoms and therapies and complaining that they are never taken seriously (they are qualified medical practitioners).
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